Since the re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States of America, European governments – perhaps with the exception of Hungary – have (finally? quickly?) began to realize, that they cannot rely on the USA to have enough interest in Europe to support its military defence. In fact, it looks more and more likely that the USA are becoming an enemy of Europe and – parallel to this – there are growing lines of confrontational division within Europe. Led by right-wing populist movements, the very legitimacy of European unification is now under severe pressure.
Keep on Black-Rocking in the Free World
As if they had been waiting and preparing for this, many voices have emerged within the establishments of European nation states, that defence spending must be increased. It does not take a genius to figure out that those who have parts of their wealth managed by Black Rock, also have strong private interests in increasing defence spending as Black Rock is well known for their involvement in stock market trading of the (mostly western) military industrial complex. This is merely a textbook example of elites using the state to funnel public funds, that have been paid for via taxation, to private bank accounts. The substantial sacrifices, that the general populations are now asked to make for the sake of national security, will ultimately end up as the private wealth of a tiny group of individuals. These sacrifices are very similar to those made under the banner of “austerity economics” which served to secure the private wealth of those who had large sums of money invested in financial markets (in vulgar populist jargon: “the banks”) which were at risk of losing everything during the credit crunch of 2007-8.
Basically, the entire discourse around increasing public spending on the military (more commonly referred to as “defence”) hinges on the production and circulation of fear that the Russians will come to take “our” land. Since the Russian invasion in the Ukraine, this fear resonates with the actuality of Russian military aggression and is thus amplified by regular news stories about war. One of the peculiar aspects about the main western news media representation of the Russian invasion in the Ukraine is the absence of any analysis of the preceding history. Anyone who does so, will be told that they are merely regurgitating Russian propaganda. Whereas it is obvious that any explanation of a lead up to an invasion might be deployed to justify the invasion, the claim that therefore we must not take it into account is to be treated with suspicion.
Hell Must Be Empty Because All The Devils Are Here
If there is no history preceding an event, the only explanation of a military invasion that remains is that the invaders are in and of themselves evil. For example, if we understand the history of the world to start at the 8th of October 2023, then we would have to conclude that the Israeli invasion into Gaza is pure evil. If we take the 7th of October 2023 as the start of history, it would be justified as a response to the acts of aggression by Hamas (this is the actual story we are being told). If we were to go further back in time and perhaps do not claim any starting point to history, we would have to conclude that most of the trouble started when “western nations” proclaimed that a piece of land that they had colonized and occupied was to be called “the state of Israel” (the so-called Balfour Declaration of 1917).
It so happens that questioning the legitimacy of the state of Israel is automatically denounced as anti-Semitic. This is not logical, but it is performatively factual. That is: engaging critically with history is a dangerous activity, especially if “the facts” contradict the official narrative. In the case of the creation of the State of Israel, the official narrative is that it was a land without people for a people without land. This clearly is factually wrong. There were actually already people living on that land and they were forcibly removed to places like Gaza. So this part of history has to be silenced and the best way to do so is an ad-hominem attack on the narrators. They are all anti-Semites.
This equally applies to narrating the history of the Russian-Ukranian conflict prior to 24 February 2022. History is replaced with myth: All – or at least many – Russians are assumed to be evil just as all Palestinians are deemed to be intrinsically evil (that is why the killing of Palestinian children is represented as self- defence by Israeli officials). Once this myth is firmly entrenched, it is obvious that with the potential collapse of NATO, European nations need to increase defence spending because “Putin” (who is the allegorical figure of “evil Russia”) will use Russia’s military superiority to pressurize “Europe” or even invade it, if it does not cave into Russia’s geopolitical interests. Without understanding history, one can believe anything.
It is therefore no surprise that right wing populist political discourse has very little patience with history and instead prefer mythology, especially that which produces myths about “human nature”, “culture”, “gender” and even “nature” itself. These myths crystallize into “identity politics”. Particular behaviour, especially that of strangers and enemies, is explained by referring to their alleged essential identities. Nationalism is a standardized and institutionalized form of identity politics: your nation is superior because both you and most of your ancestors were born in it.
“We” Europeans have preached and practiced identity thinking for over 500 years and exported it to the rest of the world through imperialism and capitalism. We have used it to justify robbery, rape, slavery and genocide, and many among us still use it to justify every single form of bigotry that one can think of. It is logical that those who take history seriously often find themselves overwhelmed by those who do not. The latter do not simply deny historical engagement on the basis of ignorance, but much more on affective and emotional grounds. They argue that historical critique only serves to justify evil.
Behold the Life, The Boundaries Fools Will Crush
In the Netherlands, a news item was published by the NOS on their website on 31. March 2025, in which the Netherlands’ Department of Defence requests that their obligation to adhere to environmental protection regulations should be waived, “for the sake of the fatherland”. That is, “Mother Nature” should allow herself to be violated (at least one more time) by “Father State”. This is quite an apocalyptic statement because it trades two futures off against each other: the immediate future of Father State and the mid-term future of Mother Nature, (as usual) in favour of the former.
Of course, a critical historical account of the deployment of concepts such as the State and Nature (see for example the work of Jason W. Moore) – including its heterosexist-familial framing – would make us quite sceptical of the claim that “Nature” and “State” have any reality other than as ideological abstractions. This however is not the point. What we see is another dimension of the extortion politics of imperial capitalism. Just as we are being extorted to make more financial sacrifices for the sake of the select few, whose capital is managed by the likes of Black Rock, by means of a denial of history and a submission to identity politics, so are we now asked to sacrifice a part of the web of life – not only that of our own but also of future generations and not just of humans but of all living entities – for the same tiny group of super wealthy individuals who claim to be “the State”.
The use of fear, that requires the censorship of critical historical analysis, is indeed identical to that of extortion: you either pay up or else…. The production fear is systematic and institutionalized. This is the true meaning of the Risk Society. It does not really matter if the danger to which a particular risk refers will actualize itself because fear seems to be completely immaterial. The (assumed) immateriality of risk is the main reason why successful insurance brokers are able to sell profitable insurance policies and also why many insurance claims are denied or rejected. It is a core factor in the workings of finance capitalism. It may sound offensive to compare insurance companies to extortion-protection rackets because the latter are associated with organized crime, whereas the former offer perfectly legal, upstanding and even valued “services”. Of course there is a difference because extortion-protection rackets are themselves the cause of the actual harm, whereas insurance companies rely on “third parties” to cause the harm; that is, whereas with extortion-protection work with the threat of actual violence, insurance companies work with risk, i.e. virtual violence. In the case of Trump’s USA and Greenland, however, it seems clear that the model is that of an extortion-protection racket rather than that of an insurance policy as the main threat to the territorial integrity and environmental security of Greenland is the USA itself. By contrast, the demands for more public spending and the waiving of environmental protection regulations for the expansion of the military industrial complex in Europe takes the form of an insurance policy: the risk of Russian aggression is virtual.
This is Part I of a more extensive analysis of Risk and Extortion I – The Risk Society of the New World Order, or: Why the future is bleak …
Disaffected Sociology 
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